Review by Booklist Review
Cosmic in her vision, provocative and comic in her storytelling, Davis draws on sources as diverse as quantum physics and tales of saints and miracles and makes place a key element in her exploratory fiction. Here, following her unusual historical novel Versailles0 (2002), she depicts a small town along the Canadian border on a glacier-carved terrain encompassing the aptly named Black Lake and teeming with beavers, bugs, birds, dogs, cats, and grasses. Three girls come across a man lying on the beach, seemingly dead. Two go for help, one stays. The man recovers. This girl has unusual powers. Davis' wry, sometimes gleeful, sometimes gloomy omniscient narrator turns her attention to a woman restoring a diary from 1872 kept by a schoolteacher responsible for a terrible tragedy. Davis then tunes in to the consciousness of Helen--smart, classy, and impatient with life in a home for the aged, her handsome son, the two women he is involved with, various animals wild and domestic, and even plants. As strange and deadly events unfold, Davis works out a calculus of the accidental and the inevitable and maps the interface of the natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Davis's unconventional style of writing this novel is not well-suited to the audio format. Chapters are told from many different characters' perspectives, and the narrative jumps around from past to present. Since Frasier does not vary her delivery or do much to differentiate the voices of the characters, it's easy to lose the thread of what's going on. The novel frequently tosses in "list-style" items, such as police logs and daily horoscopes, which are slow, distracting and repetitive when read aloud. Frasier's cool, objective voice matches the author's narrative tone, but it makes such potentially exciting scenes as a gunman taking hostages in a church flat and dull. The strength of the audio medium is in its intimacy and emotion, the ability of a talented reader to bring characters and stories to life. A novel such as this, told in the detached tone of an impartial observer, does not play to the medium's strengths. It works better on the page. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 17). (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Taking place in the small town of Varennes near the Canadian border, this novel features a Jane Austen-like country setting and a Virginia Woolf-like sensibility. It begins with fifth-grade friends Mees, Lorna, and Sunny finding a seemingly dead man on the beach and ends with an attempted murder in a church. In between, Davis (Versailles) chronicles an affair between an older man and a younger woman, beaver trapping on the local lake, a 93-year-old-woman's birthday party, and a grade school class play, among other things. While these events form more of a chronology than a plot, plot really isn't the point here. Instead, Davis takes the events and characters of a recent small-town spring and uses them for an extended meditation on time and mortality and the mysterious web of connections among all things. While the end result could have been a bit too airily "spiritual," Davis's focus on commonplace activities within the community keeps the novel firmly grounded. Recommended for all literary fiction collections.-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Metamorphosis, resurrection and the mysterious ways in which all living things are connected are the themes of Davis's homespun magical-realist sixth novel (Versailles, 2002, etc.). Its setting is Varennes, a quaint little town on the Canadian border whose inhabitants all know one another as well as they know both their own domestic animals and the latters' wild counterparts. With lordly omniscience, Davis takes us inside all these creatures' thoughts, following an arresting opening sequence in which a dead man is revived. Preadolescent Mees Kipp's life-giving "power" (first discovered when she was three, and since honed by conversations with periodic visitor Jesus) is only one of the many mysteries of growing up--as her girlfriends Lorna and Sunny only dimly comprehend. That the world is an infinitely varied, bountiful and threatening place becomes progressively clear to everyone in Varennes, including bookbinder Andrea Murdock (through whose research we learn of the long-ago "Sunday School Outing Disaster" that claimed several of the town's best and brightest); sexually hyperactive sexagenarian Piet Zeebrugge and his mother Helen, who languishes impatiently in the Crockett Home for the Aged; love-starved Billie Carpenter, who devotes her untapped energies to humanitarian and environmental causes; Mees's perpetually misbehaving malamute Margaret; a beaver targeted for annihilation by a charismatic trapper; and many others. Davis leads her characters--human and animal alike--surely toward another potential "disaster" on Pentecostal Sunday, mingling numerous seriocomic incidents with summary statements that reveal a cosmic vision that can instantly charm you, then stomp all over you (e.g., "Water has more properties that are beneficial to human beings than any other substance. Also it can drown you"). The quirky, immensely gifted Davis has been compared to Kafka, Dinesen and Hans Christian Andersen. One might also say she is to contemporary fiction what Emily Dickinson was to 19th-century poetry. A delightful, surprise-filled narrative: Davis's best yet. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
